Benjamin Franklin is a biographer’s dream. Successful, long-lived, articulate, witty, and saucy, he wrote about nearly all his activities and left a well-marked documentary trail. He made such a vivid impression on his American, French, and British contemporaries that dozens of them wrote about him, too. No wonder new biographies of him have appeared in every decade since his death in 1790. Most are highly complimentary, depicting a hard-working and high-minded man—ingenious, patriotic, and unselfish. A handful of contrarians, notably Herman Melville, D. H. Lawrence, and a few Communists (who regarded him as the prototype capitalist personality), have taken against him; but they are very much the exception.
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